Back Issue: Wounded Affections

There's been quite a bit going on for the last couple of weeks, mainly a hefty round of auditions for the musical Little Shop of Horrors, so I've been swamped in doo-wop girl singers and bloodthirsty, mutant, R&B-belting plants and there haven't been many brain cells to spare towards a fresh post, although there are a couple of ideas on the simmer.  In the interests of keeping the porch-light on, this felt like a good moment for one or two of those "From the Library" pieces I mentioned early on, and since the last post was about two ladies of the theatre, this one about two gentlemen seemed like a good pick.

I saw Caryl Churchill's oblique and troubling play A Number in its premiere production at London's Royal Court Theatre in 2002.  It had a cast of only two, but two is all you need when they're Michael Gambon (pre-Dumbledore) and Daniel Craig (pre-Bond), and it was at the time a huge success and the hardest ticket in London to get next to Maggie Smith and Judi Dench in David Hare's Breath of Life (which I didn't get to see).  An amazing woman on the RC staff somehow found me a single house seat in the fourth row, and I got to have one of the most vividly memorable theatre experiences of my life - it was like being grabbed by the front of your shirt, hoisted out of your seat, and then thrown back there gasping an hour later.  

Also, I never pass up a chance to post a picture of Daniel Craig.  (Am I right, ladies?)

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A Number by Caryl Churchill
Royal Court Theatre, November 7, 2002

If you were dissatisfied with your child, the child you made (in every sense of the word), would you if you could send him away and start over, using the same raw materials, hoping for a better result?  And if more than just one copy were made, would they all really be the same or would they be in some way individuals?  Would you find in one the same qualities you loved or hated in another, and what might that tell you about a parent's real responsibility in the raising of a child?  And what about the copy - how would it be to discover that even though you felt like, and thought of yourself as, an individual person, you were in fact only one of a number of "knock-offs," part of a batch, based on an original?  As the original, how would it feel to discover that the love that should have been yours was lavished instead on a copy - because if he's just a copy, what makes him more worth loving than you?

In this way, raising and exploring these kinds of questions through a series of brief, blazing encounters between a father and his sons, Caryl Churchill invites us to consider not so much the larger social and philosophical issues raised by the idea of cloning, which everybody writes about, but rather its potential impact at the most human level, where nature versus nurture, and parents and children anguish over their mutual expectations and the myriad ways they can fail each other.

A Number plays in a white-hot sixty minutes on a bare wooden stage, with two rather ordinary armchairs, and begins at a level of energy it takes most plays two hours to reach:   the lights bang down in the house and up on the stage, the two actors surge up over the back of the deck and stride purposefully straight down to the apron shoulder to shoulder, turn upstage for a long breath, heads down, bodies tense, one leg slightly forward like sprinters at the post, and then, choosing his moment, the younger one lifts his head and turns and launches the play.  The scenes are intensely compressed, and so is the dialogue, tight staccato sentences that are often interrupted or left incomplete so that you have to catch the story and the meaning on the fly and it isn't till afterwards that you become aware of the complexity of what you've just seen.  Churchill respects her audience, and challenges it as well - she rarely explicates a point and rarely offers an answer to the questions posed by the play, leaving it up to you to ponder what you've seen and heard and to reach your own conclusions.  Or not.

As for the production, it's the kind of creative alchemy that if you care about theatre you live in the hope of seeing.  Stephen Daldry has directed with an emotional detail and specificity that blows your mind when you see how resistant and opaque the text is on the page: no stage directions, no beats, no tonal hints, not even any punctuation, it looks like e e cummings.  Just deconstructing it to figure out what's being said (and what's not being said) must have taken days and days of rehearsal.  Daldry is also strikingly sensitive to the importance and power of silence ("words hide everything," Strindberg said, "silence hides nothing") and although again there are no silences indicated in the script, the production is alive with them, long, fierce, vibrating silences, which you can only do if you have actors whose internal monologues are strong enough to spin them out, and these guys are amazing.  Fearless about them as well, letting them stretch out almost to breaking point, sometimes literally toe to toe and looking dead into each other's eyes until whoever has the next line feels the moment to continue.  And Daldry never loses sight of the fact that at its heart this is a story about fathers and sons, and the text is brilliantly and delicately mined for every nuance of pain and tenderness in that relationship by these two remarkable actors at opposite ends of their careers.

Daniel Craig, with his battered angel's face and poet's eyes, is the young turk playing the sons. Looking both younger and slighter than he does on film in his white t-shirt and jeans, he has the

showier of the two roles but admirably resists the urge to make either a meal or a star-turn out of it, absolutely honest in all his guises.  He and Daldry have made the choice not to do a lot of flashy physical transformations; instead, he uses simple shifts in accent, affect and energy to establish the different personalities of the boys.  And as the father, the great Michael Gambon, who moves me so much just by standing there because I've been seeing him on stage for almost twenty years - as Galileo, as Benedick, as Vanya - a bull of a man in younger days, barrel-chested, big-shouldered, with a kind of pained vulnerability at the core.  He doesn't look ill any longer, as he did a few years ago for a while, but the broad shoulders have begun to stoop a bit now, the great prophet's head sits lower and heavier between them, and his wonderful melancholy face has grown longer and wearier.  He achieves the difficult task of making an essentially appalling character into a figure of terrible pathos and humanity, which has always been his particular gift of understanding: that even awful people who do dreadful things act out of pain and rage that's real and valid to them, and are perhaps more to be pitied than censured.  At one moment, he stands looking at Craig, just looking, and without warning his face fills with such naked grief that you want to turn away.  At another, he reveals to you what's happened before the dialogue does, shrivelling before your eyes until his clothes seem to hang on him.  At still another, he stand alone on stage putting on a tie - his only costume change of the evening - a bit slower than one might normally, a bit thoughtfully, but just very simply and naturally; he has startlingly lovely hands for his big, blue-collar build, long-boned and elegant with tapering fingers, and he's always been a bit vain of them, using them with liquid, almost feminine grace, so that as they move through the familiar routine of the Windsor knot you wonder why you never noticed how beautiful that everyday pattern of gesture is.  What a joy to see him again.

There was a wild, passionately appreciative response from the audience, but no standing ovation, reminding me how much less common they are in Britain than in America, where more and more it feels like everyone leaps to their feet as long as the actors have managed to remember all their lines and not fall over anything.  It seemed like a curious mix of people who were there and knew why, and people who'd sort of vaguely heard it was something they should see, or more importantly be able to say they had seen, but even they knew at the end that they'd been through something, even if they had no idea quite what it was.

"I think that older actor is somebody famous," one dot.com type was saying to his girlfriend on the way out.  "I think it's Ian Holm."

Sic transit gloria....

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Photo Credits

Nomadic Lass / Foter / CC BY-SA
brava_67 / Foter / CC BY